In this episode, Mark Lee is joined by Chris Brown, founder and CEO of ReThink Hong Kong; Bien Wong, Head of Group ESG at Towngas; and Robin Kennish, Managing Partner for ERM East Asia, to reflect on key insights from ReThink Hong Kong 2026 conference. They explore how businesses across Asia-Pacific are moving beyond sustainability ambition and target-setting toward implementation and value creation. Their conversation examines the role of energy transition, climate finance, and integrated transition planning in helping organizations build resilience and competitiveness while navigating a rapidly changing operating environment. 

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Podcast Transcript

The transcript highlights below have been edited for clarity 

Mark Lee 

Hello everyone and welcome to this next episode of the Sustainable Connections podcast. If you are at all a regular listener, you'll have heard my voice before. I'm Mark Lee, Global Director of Thought Leadership at ERM, and the regular host of this podcast series that we run. Bouncing around the globe a little bit today, at least from where I am. I'm sitting in California, and today we're going to be talking about the Rethink Hong Kong 2026 event, which has just gone past.

If you're not familiar with Rethink, it's a gathering of business leaders, investors, innovators, policymakers, and sustainability practitioners. This year's event was September 10th to 11th. We're recording this event in a gathering momentum period of climate events globally in that we're just after Rethink in Hong Kong and just before New York Climate Week. So, part of that late season rush that the world seems to make to try and figure out this incredibly pressing agenda.

Focusing on Rethink, the conference is taking place more broadly at an important moment for the Asia-Pacific region. In the region, like peers globally, folks are navigating economic uncertainty. There's evolving regulation, sometimes moving in opposite directions depending on where you live as it relates to sustainability disclosure and other issues. We see rising climate and nature risks, including their physical impacts in terms of heat and flood and otherwise, tremendously increasing energy demand almost all over the world based on rising living standards and population growth and data centers and, and, and,… there are renewed concerns about energy security and affordability. All these things together, and this is a thread through some of the Sustainable Connections conversations, are moving sustainability from a standalone agenda to be a core part of business transformation. It's one thing to say that it's another thing to figure out how to do that.

So, some of these tensions were captured in ERM's recently published APAC Trends Report. The report dug into some of the themes we want to pick up in today's conversation on the podcast. Asia Pacific's growing sustainability influence and its role as the world's clean energy engine. Also, how the region's energy security vulnerabilities might influence corporate decision making. As many economies in the region are exposed to imported fossil fuels, supply disruptions, price volatility, and geopolitical risk. Mostly though, we're going to work through what today's guests heard on the ground at Rethink and how it reflects some of the questions that I've laid out here at the start.

Thankfully, I'm not going to try and do this by myself. I'm joined by a great group of panelists today, and I want to introduce and then say a welcome to all of them. Chris Brown, who in the context of Rethink is the founder of Rethink. Chris, welcome. It's great to have you on the podcast today. Also with us, we've got Bien Wong, who is from Towngas, or the Hong Kong and China Gas Company Limited. I'll probably refer to Towngas throughout today's podcast. Great to have you as well. And then third panelist is Robin Kennish, who is one of my colleagues at ERM, was also at Rethink Hong Kong and is going to help us unpick what happened there. I'm going to give you each moment to introduce yourself and to tell us something that stood out most for you at Rethink this year. Chris, I think given your role as founder, I'm going to let you go first and set the tone. 

 

Key takeaways from Rethink HK

Chris Brown 

Hi Mark and thank you so much for having me. I'm Chris Brown, founder, CEO of Rethink Hong Kong, but also the Rethink Foundation as well, which is our arm's length not-for-profit organization that sits alongside the main event business. We've organized Rethink now, this is the 7th edition, the 6th at any kind of scale. The first one was a little teeny tiny version, predominantly because that was in October 2020 in the very first stages of COVID. 

I mean, for a little bit anyway for us, year one was teeny tiny and we had to very much downscale our ambition and also downscale the operations because of those, that kind of early uncertainty around COVID. However, over the next four years, whilst Hong Kong was still under COVID restrictions, we didn't finish COVID till March 2024 in Hong Kong. So, the first four editions of Rethink were all organized and hosted in person, but under COVID restrictions. I think from day one, we were demonstrating that resilience certainly was going to become one of the key phrases that underpinned why Rethink exists.  

In terms of this year's Rethink, which happened, as you said, just a few days ago at the end of last week, I think what stood out for me was the maturity of the conversations. I've always described Rethink as a looking glass or a mirror reflection of what's happening in the ecosystem. And that is from many different perspectives, that's the content, the stakeholders, commercially who's backing it, who's willing to invest and contribute, who attends. And so, we are a reflection of the ecosystem, predominantly Hong Kong orientated, but increasingly from an Asia-Pacific perspective as well.

That was intentional through our advisory groups and the guidance we get from the industry and from key stakeholders, maturing the conversation from why sustainability matters to really focus firmly on delivering transition at scale and doing so in a way that strengthens a businesses or an organization or an economy's competitiveness and resilience. That was really important for us to demonstrate that we have the capacity to do that as the event curator because we hear what is happening in the sustainability meetings, we hear what is happening in the boardrooms, the discussions around sustainability and ESG and impact and everything else that businesses have to worry about. 

It was really important that we gently took a step change from why do we need to do this? Why are you trying to save the planet? What’s all the fuss about to actually, well what is the reality of integrating a transition into a business's operations and its financing? How does that contribute towards the future sustainability or viability of that business? And obviously, you then scale that up into economy scale, how is that going to hopefully contribute towards a greener and lower carbon economy for Hong Kong in the future. I think that fundamentally was the thing that stood out, but it was kind of by design. And from a personal moment, sharing the stage with Professor Deborah Roberts from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and getting a pretty fresh perspective from her on their overshoot analysis, which I think even for the most learned and educated and aware in the room, which obviously there were lots of, a sobering moment.  

Mark Lee 

Terrific. And just quickly before I move on to the other panelists, Chris, year seven and how many people at Rethink this year? 

Chris Brown 

We'll get the final numbers this week, but something just north of 6,500. 

Mark Lee 

Great to hear. Such an interesting breadth across the agenda must have been a sobering moment as described. I've seen those IPCC numbers, and they're alarming.

Bien, please, tell us a little bit about yourself, your role at Towngas, and also one of the things that stood out for you at this year's Rethink. 

Bien Wong 

Hi Mark, thank you for having me today. It's my pleasure to be with a close group of sustainability professionals within the region. I'm the ESG head of Towngas. I look after all the sustainability integrations, especially for our company. We have over 1000 projects across mainland China. We founded our company back in 1862. So indeed, we are the longest public utility in Hong Kong. Despite talking about a lot about the transition these days, but indeed, when we first founded the company until 1973, we still used coal as one of the feed stocks. Indeed, we have already been the only utility in town that is coal free. And we have been doing a lot of transitioning throughout the years. We entered the mainland China market, the Chinese mainland market back in 1994. So, we bring our expertise, our experiences, our technologies, our engineering potentials all into the mainland China market.  

Since then we have evolved from like a city gas company. So now it's like a conglomerate where we have a lot of new energy solutions to solve the hard to abate sectors like the sea, land, and air transport. So, taking an incubated company, EcoCeres as an example, we are now the second largest global supplier in terms of sustainable aviation fuel. We are under the sustainability radar but trying to find a mutually benefit solutions to the environment and also to the business.  

Regarding Rethink, it has been in Hong Kong, shedding some light in the Asia-Pacific region. In Hong Kong, I think the sustainability momentum began back in 2015 to 2016, because at that time, the Hong Kong regulatory market, they had mandatory sustainability reporting. So, it has been a requirement for listed companies to disclose all those sustainability contexts. In Hong Kong since 2024, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, especially the finance end, they have put the second week of September to be the Hong Kong Green Week. So, Rethink has been one of the signature events over the years, and Towngas is very happy to play a part in Rethink and also support the Hong Kong Monetary Authority's all the agenda items. So, this year, this is indeed our first time setting up setting up our booth in rethink showcasing our new energy developments. 

Mark Lee 

It sounds like you're pulling off almost a small miracle, Bien, that from 1862 is a long time and you're describing yourself as still under the radar, which has to be a bit of a trick, not letting people know you for that long.

But in all seriousness, I'm always fascinated by companies with that kind of pedigree in terms of their experience, because as you hinted at that, you've gone through transformations before. When we talk about transforming the economy and shifting to a low carbon future, it's useful to have people who've gone through different kinds of transformations already in the past.  

Robin, want to let you introduce yourself as well, tell people what you do and also a perspective that stood out for you from this year's Rethink. 

Robin Kennish 

Thanks a lot, Mark. I'm Robin Kennish. I'm the Managing Partner for ERM's business units across East Asia. So that covers Hong Kong and mainland China. Most of my work is with Hong Kong corporates looking at helping them with their sustainability agenda, whether it's from sustainability disclosures that are now needing to meet International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB) requirements through the implementation of the new ESG code that the Hong Kong Stock Exchange has put forward or it's tackling some of those trickier topics around climate resilience and adaptation, or even nature as well and nature strategies. So, a good breadth of work, particularly, as I said, particularly from corporates.

I think for me with Rethink, we've been supporting the conference for the last five to six years. I think one person went to the first version of Rethink, because I think Chris only gave us one ticket. So, we had our first taste of it then. And as Chris said, it was a room of maybe 100, 200 people talking about some of the key topics. It was really clear that there was no way we could cover everything in one day with just 100 people, so the need for such a big conference came out quite quickly. We've committed to it because we think it's a great opportunity for us all to informally share our views at booths and in the networking areas but also put our perspectives across at the panels. The last couple of years, we've also done roundtables with the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) on topics that are relevant to many of our clients who have also contributed sometimes to some of those WBCSD papers. So that makes the conference quite rich.

I think for me this year, there was a strong shift. I think Chris touched on the maturity of businesses and the approach that businesses are taking to sustainability. Four or five years ago, the talk was very much around, wow we have all these new frameworks coming in, we have Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD), we've got ISSB coming forwards. How do we organize ourselves around that and get our sustainability programs in place? That maybe led to a flourishing of targets within many of our client organizations. Sometimes that could be 100 KPIs that they may be trying to manage against. This year's discussion was a lot more about focus and a lot more about which of these KPIs and targets we have been already kind of business as usual. It's almost like the ticket that we need to purchase to play in this arena. Which of these KPIs are really the ones that we should focus our time on, the ones that are adding value to the business and the ones that really need broad attention so that they can help funnel the precious amount of capital that they have to those initiatives.

Obviously, climate resilience and transition planning are one of those key topics. You could see that across many of the sessions that took place during the conference. And it made the discussions quite intense, quite focused. I think everybody I spoke to at some point used the words value creation that came up in the conference. 

Mark Lee 

Kind of on everyone's lips. Well, the three of you collectively have given us some great hints about what happened at this year's conference. Robin, I'll warn you now, I'm going to end up coming back to integrated transition planning.  

But first, Chris, I wanted to go back to you, and I think your opening comments there gave us a sense of the many topics being covered and maybe how those have evolved over time. And maybe it's semantics, but I think there's a shift from topics to themes. And can you give us a sense of the major themes that cut across the event or that maybe have developed momentum at the event over years? Not all of them, but one or two, so we have a bit deeper flavor. 

Chris Brown

So really there were three themes that we wanted to make sure were intertwined into all the programs and sessions. Firstly, that was implementation over intention. As Robin alluded to, the era of target setting really is giving way to execution, whether that's around supply chain decarbonization, blended finance, biodiversity, nature, all the 139 sessions, so we cover a lot. I guess that was the core message to our content partners to ensure that we are at least in part addressing that shift.  

For the first time this year, we had a brand-new energy theatre. This was two days covering the energy transition in various different discussions around the financing of it, the operational element to it, the collaboration side of it, and obviously energy security as a strategic priority. That came up not just in the energy theatre, but that was coming up in the main keynote stage and Towngas were wonderful and hosted a dedicated session on that for us on the second day. It's also coming on the impact stage as well. So, what is the impact of this, the challenges around a slow energy transition? Where within a business's value chain is that really having direct and real impact?  

I think the final point was again another point that Robin alluded to, it's like we practiced this, we didn't, I promise, was around integrated transition planning. So yes, climate, but increasingly nature, but definitely people, and finance. And companies are starting to break down the kind of silos and treat sustainability as business transformation rather than a standalone program that has become I guess the thorn in people's side over the past few years. That integration into business, the shifting responsibility for delivering on that within a, especially within a corporation and it was, I guess not being afraid to just recognize that things have changed, things are changing. Again, our role at ReThink is to bring those to the surface and hopefully give some explanation as to why it's happening and the impact that it's going to have. 

Energy transition in practice: hydrogen, renewables, and climate finance

Mark Lee 

Thank you. So, 139 sessions, we obviously can't get into all of them, but Bien and Robin, with your help, I hope to get into a couple of those rooms and actually find out what happened.

Bien, I know you were in one session at least on hydrogen scalability, and I think you'll have to explain to us why that topic, what role might it play in Hong Kong's energy transition? What did it reveal about the pertinent realities of trying to accelerate energy transition in the region? 

Bien Wong 

Echoing to what Chris has mentioned, I think Rethink has over the past few years, I think has turned into a signature event in town. I remember on day one, the kickoff, where we had the Under Secretary for the Environment and Ecology Bureau, Diane Wong, attend and delivered the keynote. During her keynote speech, she shed some forthcoming expectations on hydrogen. For example, she said that next year in 2027, Hong Kong will be launching the hydrogen certification schemes in town. I think this actually echoes to a lot of the panels, what we were talking about during the discussions. I think there were two keywords that kept resurfacing during those discussions. One is about the standardization and another one is about certifications. Because a lot of the time when we do a lot of new energy development, if we are only viewing the adaptation, the applications within the region, the business scale will be very limited.  

So how are we doing that? We want to view all the alternative solutions as a regional alternative solution or hopefully on a global scale. So, when we talk about all sorts of new alternative energies, we view currently within our company. So, we have four of them. One of them is hydrogen that we have had a keynote panel at Rethink in Hong Kong this year. Another one is about green methanol, which we are talking about for shipping vessels. We have sustainable aviation fuel for the aircrafts. Last but not least are the solar PV set for the industrial and commercial sectors. Solar PVs in the commercial and industrial industries in Chinese mainland. I think all of them, we view them in a whole bucket. I think currently SAF, the sustainable aviation fuel, is a more elevated version, as momentum is gaining globally with global mandates, where some countries require departing flights to consume SAF before they can actually enter the territory.

But currently in Hong Kong, I think the hydrogen is more on the localized scales. But where the Hong Kong government, they are actually having types of new standardization schemes, we have been attending different consultation sessions in past. I think one brilliant thing is that they do the EU aligned approach for the green hydrogen. So, when we talk about hydrogen, we differentiate them into different colors. The gray ones are the ones from fossil fuel base. If we have the blue ones, we have to further deploy the carbon capture and utilization. The most ideal one will be the green hydrogen, where Hong Kong, we are now actually having the first green hydrogen projects, while Towngas, it its partnership with Veolia, we are hopefully having the first breath of green hydrogen early next year. So, I think during the discussions, we talked a lot on the standardization because we know that next year Hong Kong will be having an EU-aligned green hydrogen certifications. How can we fulfill them and what will be the potential market potential there? 

Integrated transition planning and value creation

Mark Lee 

Yeah, we've had folks on the podcast talking about the EU standards guidelines on hydrogen in the past. So, some of them will probably, some of our listeners today will hopefully recognize the color scheme and really appreciate how hard it is to move to green instead of gray or blue and the work that you're trying to do. It's interesting that you're scaling it there at that regional level and then trying to push it out.  

Robin, I want to come to you with a topic we've already touched, and everybody's mentioned it at this point actually and it's the integrated transition planning. You were in that room, and I would imagine that was a topic in more than one room.

I think for our listeners, can you say quickly what integrated transition planning is? It's not completely widely understood at this point. And then share the messages that you picked up on it at Rethink this year. 

Robin Kennish 

Most folks will be used to climate transition plans, which will traditionally just focus mainly on emissions reductions and progress towards a particular end goal, whether that's net zero by 2050 or cutting emissions by half by 2035.With integrated transition planning, it's much more focused on connecting the dots across the business, particularly in relation to climate, nature, people, business resilience and then with a lens about where to allocate the capital for that transition, where to bring in the business value, so that you can have all of those components working together. So, it's taking the transition planning away from it being potentially siloed in one particular area and then focus more on sort of the other key elements of sustainability.  

It's very much come about from the Just Transition sort of space given, given that Asia still does have a lot of coal-fired power plants, whether they are captive ones, mines, whether they are still in mainland China, in Hong Kong, or a lot of our energy still comes from coal and that's being phased out over the next 10 to 15 years. But we still have two or three significant coal-fired power plants. So, the phasing out of that and then finding jobs for the folks that are working in those coal-fired power plants has become a topic. And now a lot of the companies in Hong Kong are focusing on how can we bring people along with these transitions? How can we also bring other aspects along such as nature? We knew that this was a topic that many of our clients were leaning into. So, we organized this workshop with WBCSD because ERM and WBCSD had just published a framework on this. In fact, there's going to be a toolkit for clients coming out over the next six months. So that's something for folks to look forward to.  

In the room we had some great discussions. So let me just pull out maybe one or two. We had a couple of investors in the room, and we asked them. What are you looking for in integrated transition planning? They were very focused on, we've got to see the business improvements in terms of efficiency and value creation from this transition plan. There has to be wise use of the capital involved in this, and it has to make sense for the business. That was sort of one key takeaway from the investors. From a food and beverage and agriculture client, their transition planning approach has been integrated essentially from the start. They very quickly, when they were looking at climate risks, realized that they had a significant impact on nature as well with regards to pollination, soil, pH, resilience of the crops that they were growing. And then obviously their supply chain is quite heavily people involved. So, they sort of stepped back from doing climate risk assessments and said, OK, let's look at this in an integrated way. So, we'll do nature, climate, and people assessments all rolled into one so that we can make sure that the approach we take forward over the next few years covers those three topics in an integrated way. So instead of siloing it, we actually bring everybody together in a collaborative environment.  

I think another takeaway from this, if I can add, was one great question was who should own transition plans, integrated transition plans. There's some great discussion in the room. Obviously, some people said, or the CSO or the sustainability team needs to own this. And then another comment from one of the investors was, actually, when we're looking at investor grade integrated transition plans, we want to know that everyone's involved. So, we want to know that your engineering team is involved so that the solutions are actually practical and there's been an engineering lens applied to it. We want to know that HR is involved, your people teams have been involved. We want to know your supply chain managers and procurement have been involved. We don't see this as something that sits with the sustainability team. We see this as something that should be essentially embedded into core business process. 

Mark Lee 

There are so many parts of this, but you kind of mapped it out for us well. I recognize that transition from the just transition world, but also the elements of financial quantification and value that go into the integrated transition planning work and also proving that it's really an enterprise approach.  

Bien, I'm going to jump to you with something related. I know there was another session on scaling renewables, and it was about integrated climate finance. And so, there's the finance element Robin talked about the mood and the tone of the investors in the room at his session. What role does climate finance play in turning integrated transition plans into action? 

Bien Wong 

I think in the past when we view the value chain, because we are the energy supplier, we view the value chain like energy production, we talked about the transmissions, and we want to see how our downstream users are actually working on the applications. But now currently in recent years, we are seeing the value chain extended also to the part on the inflow capital inflow. During the green week, we talked a lot about the green taxonomies, the transition financing and some blended capital, but we are seeing that type of flow of funds discussion. How do we integrate into energy transitions? I think in Hong Kong, prior to the taxonomies being released during the beginning of Green Week, actually there is a new paper or new prototype launched covering all those types of low carbon liquid fuels, they actually provided guidance for banks and also the investors. How do they define the word green, when we talked about it from the energy end. So, this provides clarity for banks and also corporates to strike a deal and facilitate all the capital inflows. I think this is one thing that I see in the capital finance part.  

And another thing that I would like to highlight is how I view the consumption patterns regarding Southeast Asia and also the westernized market? Because it provides clarity on the business opportunity. In the Western market energy consumption patterns, I think they face winter heat heating spikes. So, a lot of the time, energy consumptions are peaking at those moments. But in the Southeast Asia region, we are experiencing an intense year-round cooling demand with air conditioning. I think with this in place, the energy demand on the patterns will be quite different.

Investors or also banks want to understand these types of patterns, so they can understand when the entire value chain and different stakeholders will need the capital. So, this will be quite different, for example when international banks come to Southeast Asia countries, they will see it's quite different when they strike deals than in the westernized market. Also, I think the climate risks actually mirror a lot of the changes to some of the consumption patterns. For example, like El Nino, when it brings different types of extreme weather events. Taking some Asian countries as an example, when there is a severe drought, if they have a strong reliance on hydropower, they may need to find different types of alternatives. So, when we strike some new potential opportunities, it might change compared to like 10 years ago. 

Mark Lee 

Yeah, and I think the one thing you hit there that stands out for me is that the patterns themselves are investable and we need to understand the patterns in order to follow those. And then just where you ended, you're describing the situation around hydro in your region. One of the things we're living through here in California is that more drought means less water behind dams, means less power, means we have to use more non-renewable power because the dam is not producing as much. So, these things tend to move in vicious circles at times, and we have to get ahead of them.

Chris, I want to bridge from the last two things that Robin and Bien were talking about if integrated transition plans are about just transition and about bringing forward the financial value, the quantification piece and discovering those patterns. We're certainly seeing at other events and in other corporate conversations that companies are moving from of ambition statements and targets to much more detailed plans to map out what their scalable pathways forward will look like.

I think there's a tension there between economic performance or market performance and sustainability ambition, and it's part of maybe sustainability growing up. Was that in the conversations this year at Rethink as well? 

Chris Brown 

Not just at Rethink, I think that where we are in the overall progress around sustainability, I think that's become so apparent. Over the last 18 months, I would really say, and I think it's coming to a bit of a head. And in preparation for this question, I went back through some notes from a meeting I had a while ago and someone said to me this, targets don't reduce emissions, delivery does. Ever since I embarked on the Rethink journey back in 2019 when I first started to put it together. So much of those early days was the targets was all everyone spoke about like setting a target was done like great. We've set the target. Hooray. Aren't we amazing? I think that not only has the severity of the climate crisis really been, we’ve all been punched in the face in it one way or another over the past three or four years and as Bien said, that's not going to stop. And so, I think regardless of their ambition and regardless of their achievability, I think just focusing on targets now, regardless of what kind of business you are and what scale and what maturity, I think even down to a small SME like us, we set targets for ourselves around zero waste, around carbon neutrality for our event operations and overall business operations. I think probably we felt like, you know, we can set the target and not that it will happen by magic at all, but things will progress, the ecosystem will progress, things will become easier for us to get this done. And I think that hasn't really happened. Actually, it's become harder and you really have to rethink those targets and the value that they mean to you and to your stakeholders.

I think we've seen it, haven't we? Globally, we've seen big brands, big organizations, legitimately downgrade their ambitions because the reality of achieving them is becoming really apparent. I guess they should be applauded for that rather than chastised, actually being honest that we might not be able to achieve this and here are the reasons, whether we take all of that at face value. But I mean, it's really challenging. And I find it challenging running, a small business. So, when I get to hear that insight from, big corporations, conglomerates running, big carbon intensive businesses across the world, it's not easy. But I think the shift now from, the reality check on targets and really focusing on value creation if we want to keep the sustainability dream alive, if businesses are not doing that, they're really going to lose traction in boardrooms and investor meetings pretty quickly. 

Mark Lee 

Yeah, targets may have been a steppingstone. We all need to work our way past and through, but to your other tagline, I love the addition of this one, its delivery is what matters. One of the things that's come up in several conversations on the podcast and otherwise recently is that as a field, we had a theory of change about targets and disclosure. That if we set ambitious targets and we disclosed on performance, that we would make sort of almost necessary progress towards the future we were mapping out and it hasn't turned out to be so simple.  

Robin, last question for any of you on integrated transition planning. But it's one thing to say we're going to financially quantify the risks and the opportunities and the dependencies and now spell it out in numbers and get it right. It's another thing to do that. Can you give us just a hint of how folks start to work this into capital allocation and decision making? 

Robin Kennish 

I would suggest that one of the most straightforward ways is to sort of step back a bit and work out what the actual material issues are to the business. I know that sounds a bit cliched and we talk about materiality assessments all the time, but I think there's been a shift in terms of how those materiality assessments are done. Again, three, four years ago, we may have given stakeholders a list of 30-40 topics to prioritize, a lot of those would be very ESG focused. And that sort of dictated the way the materiality assessment was focused. And it was very much a, how is business impacting the world approach. So, with the introduction more of double materiality assessments and that focused more on, well, how's the world affecting business? That's brought a different lens in and the way double materiality assessments have been done, particularly in Hong Kong of late, is getting a lot more granularity around the key inputs from investors. What do investors want to see in terms of focus of the business? What's important to them? Secondly, what's really important to customers? What's going to drive engagement with that business and improve the revenues for that business? Thirdly, obviously what the shareholders are looking for, what other external parties are looking for from the business.

Very quickly, we start to see that there are some key material aspects. Often those are centered around climate resilience, climate adaptation, energy efficiency, and general efficiency of the business. So that gives the boards, that gives the management and the team leaders some focus, which is great for transition planning because it gives us a lot more granularity around where we should be allocating the money. So, if we know that, for example, energy efficiency of the buildings, of our production lines, of our manufacturing is critical to investor confidence, to customer confidence, then we know that that's where we can start to allocate capital and make sure that we're really focusing on that. And I think that's an important point because geopolitically Hong Kong and China have gone through a lot of flux over the last couple of years and stock markets have been interesting. Some of them have been booming, some not so much. But in general, the theme from corporates has been, it's a tougher market out there, it's a lot more competitive.

So, when we're allocating capital to sustainability, we need to make sure it's really important to our key stakeholders, whether they be investors, customers, or internal stakeholders. So, the integrated transition plan allows us to say, okay, this is where we're heading, how do we get there? And which are the elements that we can actually fund that are most important to the people that are driving value for our business and looking at us and saying, yeah, that's a responsible, well-governed business because they're putting money in the right places.

So that's maybe a long way of answering the question, but that's the real theme that we're seeing coming out of this, particularly Rethink, because I think there were maybe five or six conversations at our booth, which were all about I have all these priorities, but which ones should I focus on? How can you help us talk to stakeholders, talk to our investors to drill down onto what's key for them and therefore will drive value for the business for, say, the next 10-15 years? 

Looking ahead: what comes next for APAC’s transition?

Mark Lee 

Really helpful, Robin. And I think you've given us a picture of how corporations and others can use quantification as one of the tools they need to step forward. And maybe using that as a stepping point, Bien and Chris, I'm going to give each of you a chance to take a peek in your crystal balls and use that as a way to wrap things up.  

Bien, I'm going to start with you and then give Chris the last word. Bien, I'm thinking of where you started, TownGas, almost a century and a half of experience. You've watched lots of technologies transitions. I'm curious what you think about the energy technologies or the business models or the partnerships that have the greatest potential to change Hong Kong going forward based on all that experience. 

Bien Wong 

Yeah, I think just now Chris has been talking about the targets, Robin has been talking about the business impacts. I think from us as a company, what investors are asking for us is about execution. They want to understand how do we put all the types of targets or maybe a lot of the new energy development trends, etc., into business profits. This is all during all types of investor calls, no matter international ones, Chinese based ones, local ones, they all reach consensus, is how do we make them executionable and on the localized or maybe regional landscape.

I think one thing is a lot of people when they view us as an energy provider, they will think that, oh, you should find more application scenarios that could actually generate profits or maybe some different use cases. But from us, I think we need to view that from an ecosystem perspective, apart from being an energy supplier from the application end, we also need policy support where we anticipate a new round of national five-year plans. Hong Kong will be releasing one of its city level five-year plans. How do they actually foster the momentum of the new development, taking hydrogen as an example, despite Hong Kong, the government, they have the strategy development plan in place, but what are the subsidies, will there be subsidies on the research end or maybe the application? And this is something that we want to see and also the industry level and also academia level.

Last but not least, the talent, where does talent come from? Because these are all new energies that no one has done in the past. So how do we re-engine our staff to have those types of professional qualifications? I think is one very important thing that we should not be neglecting, that talent is key. 

Mark Lee 

Terrific. Chris, coming across to you for a last word on, if Bien and Towngas have a century and a half, you've got seven, but we wish you many multiples of seven ahead. As you build these future rethinks, as you watch where the region's going to go next, how do you think business is going to change its approach to sustainability and energy transition in Hong Kong and maybe across the APAC region? 

Chris Brown 

I think, and probably being optimistic, but I always have been, that the conversation will shift from what is the cost of this? What is the cost of this transition and where is this creating value and where are we going to make money from, to be at least equally considered alongside what is the cost of not transitioning and actually what is the impact to our business, city, society, planet if we don't do this? Unfortunately, I think that big shift will only be accelerated through some pretty horrific climate scenarios and incidences. I still think there is very much a well, not on my doorstep mindset from people, businesses. You know, we see what's happening around the world and even in Hong Kong, we get hit pretty hard every now and again by some pretty violent typhoons. But, Hong Kong as it is, 12 hours later, we're up and running again. We forget very quickly. We see our neighbors in the Philippines and Indonesia and even on the mainland getting really devastating floods and typhoons.

I know that's a sad way to think about it, but maybe it will require something really impactful for Hong Kong as a whole, as a society, as an economy to wake up and start thinking about the impact of climate change in a different way. I've lived in Hong Kong now for nearly 14 years and Hong Kongers love money, love making money. But if we're hit in a really bad way and that it gets restricted, or on a business as usual can't continue, then that might be what gives us the wake-up call. A sad scenario, but an inevitable one, I think. 

Mark Lee 

Yeah and one of the trends in polling that I tend to follow is the number of citizens worldwide that perceive that either they or people they know have been directly impacted by climate change and in a variety of different sources, that's way beyond 50% now. It's up in the 70% range in most regions, if not higher. And yet, even though people feel they're living through that experience of the negative physical impacts of climate change, be it heat, fire or anything else, flooding, it's not yet changing our behaviors. So maybe that's the challenge we leave things on today. 

I think we're at that point where I need to say thanks if I can. And of course, I want to say thanks to my three panelists today. Bien Wong of TownGas, much appreciate you being here. Chris Brown of Rethink and Robin Kennish, my colleague from ERM. It's been great to have all of you on the program.

For those of you who've listened through, we appreciate you listening to the session. If you have any thoughts, questions, or reflections on it, then please give us some feedback. If you're interested in the Sustainable Connections podcast series, all the episodes are on our website at erm.com. They're also on your platform of choice. So, we hope you might choose to listen to some of those as well. That's everything for today. Thanks again to the panelists and thanks to all of you who chose to listen.